In this paper, Marian Dawkins gives a summary of the history of the study of animal consciousness, and describes problems that scholars currently have in proving or demonstrating animal consciousness. In describing the history of animal behaviorism and related scholarship, as well as the the study of human consciousness, Dawkins explores how human shortcomings in understanding our own cognition also hamper our ability to recognize consciousness in other animals. However, Dawkins ultimately questions whether a detailed knowledge of animal consciousness is even necessary to provide animals with the welfare that they deserve.

Marian Dawkins opens her 2014 paper with a direct and challenging statement: “Consciousness has always been both central to and a stumbling block for animal welfare. […] Unable to understand our own consciousness, we are even more at a loss when it comes to its possible existence in other species.” Dawkins describes something she calls “the paradox” of animal consciousness: because we are unable to arrive at a true “science” of animal consciousness, and because animal welfare appears to hinge on some understanding of animal consciousness, one acts as a major barrier for the other. Dawkins says that “there are four different ways of dealing with this paradox that can be found among people who all call themselves animal welfare scientists: 1) Animal consciousness is not a problem for scientific study.There is therefore no paradox. 2) Although we cannot study it directly, we can do the next best thing and study the behavioral and physiological correlates of it. 3) Animal consciousness is problematic at the moment because we do not yet have the right research methods for studying it. However, with more research […] the paradox will disappear. 4) Solving it is not central to a scientific study of animal welfare. The paradox therefore exists but it does not matter.” Indeed, Dawkins notes that welfare scientists have been working around this paradox for some time, finding all kinds of non-verbal, indirect ways to understand animal feelings and desires.

Dawkins spends a considerable amount of time explaining how our understanding of human emotion could actually help us understand animal consciousness. She describes how “human emotions are widely regarded as having three separate components. The first component includes physiological changes such as increased heart rate, increased temperature, and changes in hormone levels. The second component includes all the behavior, facial expressions, and sounds that people make when they are in the grip of an emotion. The third component is the conscious experience of emotions.” Though she notes that we can’t (nor should we) expect to find universal indicators that can apply to all animals, if we are serious about understanding animal consciousness, we must recognize that different animals have different tools to express themselves, and “it is up to us to read the signs.” Though she stresses in numerous places that much of animal welfare can be addressed “completely independently” of any concern for consciousness, she does anticipate some objection to that view: “Physical health may be one important component of good welfare but it is not the only one. What about the mental health of animals, the component concerned with what animals ‘feel,’ the component that gives animal welfare its particular moral weight? By leaving out consciousness, have not we left out the most important element of all?”

Dawkins suggests that serious welfare scientists should avoid the paradox as much as possible, and they can do this most effectively by “admitting that consciousness is still such a problem that we cannot study it directly (as indeed has occurred in the study of human consciousness). […] This is less ambitious but leaves animal welfare science on a sound objective basis, doing what it can to incorporate consciousness into its research but not claiming to have achieved more than it has.” Dawkins very much wants to make sure that animal welfare science is seen as a legitimate science and that it continues to make positive contributions “to one of the greatest of all biological puzzles of all, why pain, suffering, and pleasure feel like anything at all.”

Original Abstract:
Animal welfare science has a potentially paradoxical attitude to animal consciousness. On the one hand, the belief that animals are conscious is what draws people to want to study animal welfare, but on the other, consciousness remains ‘the hard problem’ and seems currently to be beyond the usual methods of science. This article asks whether the study of animal welfare that includes ‘feelings’ can be truly scientific by examining changing scientific attitudes to studying consciousness that have taken place over the last 50 years. Human psychologists have a similar problem in studying human consciousness and their findings provide a framework for studying feelings in nonhuman animals. Animal welfare scientists have at least four different ways of dealing with the potential paradox of animal consciousness. These are the following: (1) To argue that there are no problems and so there is no paradox (2) To admit the difficulties of studying consciousness and to settle for the next best thing—the likely (but not certain) behavioral correlates of consciousness (3) To admit the difficulties but then try to find ways of studying consciousness more directly (4) To ignore the problem altogether and concentrate on studying animal welfare in ways that are independent of assumptions about animal consciousness. I conclude that it is possible to have a science of animal welfare that avoids being paradoxical and is able to make a genuine contribution to the greatest remaining mystery in biology—why suffering, pleasure, and pain feel like anything at all.